comely, and obviously pregnant, young mistress in the house before his wife's coffin was even laid in the tomb, his brother-in-law began to suspect foul play. He insisted on the coffin being opened in the presence of witnesses. Despite the outraged protests from Warren and the parish priest, he commanded the tiring maids to lift the dead woman's clothes as he searched the body for the marks of violence he was certain he would find. He looked for stab wounds, bruises from strangulation, bumps on the head, but there was nothing.
He was about reluctantly to admit he had been mistaken, when a clerk pointed to the heap of maggots that had fallen to the bottom of the coffin as the clothes were disturbed. The woman had been dead a few days, so at first none but the clerk could see anything amiss in discovering maggots feasting on the corpse. Until, that is, the clerk pointed out that the maggots were no longer feasting; they were as dead as their dinner. And the unfortunate pig which was fed a morsel of the corpse's liver, the hounds having refused it, likewise sickened and died the next day. There could be no doubt; Warren's wife had been poisoned.
Although the brother now had evidence of his sister's murder, proving that his brother-in-law was the murderer was not so easy. Warren had been engaged on urgent business in London when his wife had died, and furthermore he swore that before he left, his wife told him she was intending to send for Gunilda to cure her of some woman's malady. No husband in the land could be expected to define precisely what a woman's problem might be. So no one questioned him further on this point.
A quaking servant in turn swore that he'd seen Gunilda visiting his mistress the very day she died. Gunilda denied it, of course, but who could she call upon to confirm her story that Warren had visited her? A nobleman, a Norman, creeping to her hovel in the night — it was a preposterous idea.
Gunilda was tried by ordeal of fire. She was forced, in front of the clergy, to carry a red-hot iron bar for ten paces. Afterwards her hand was bound and a seal put upon the wrappings and she was left to lie in the Bishop's dungeon for three days. Her daughter was permitted to stay with her, and for those three days, despite her mother's agony, they whispered and talked and slept little. There were so many secrets Gunilda had to entrust to her daughter, so much knowledge and so little time left. Just a few hours before, Gunilda believed she had years left to pass on all her skills to her child, now she knew she had only three days and three nights.
For Gunilda was certain of what they would discover beneath the bandages on the third day. There was no use hoping for a miracle. If she'd had time, a warning before the ordeal, she could have protected herself. She'd saved many others from the gallows over the years, for she could make unguents, almost invisible to the eye, which, painted on to the hand, would protect it from serious burns and help the skin to heal rapidly. But there had been no time to anoint herself.
When the seal was broken and the priest removed the bandages, the raw, festering wound proclaimed her guilt. The sentence was death by burning with the mercy of strangulation before the flames reached her, if she confessed.
She did confess. The falsehood made no difference now; she couldn't save her life, so why die in agony? She didn't fear going to the life beyond with a lie weighing down her immortal soul, for neither she nor her sobbing daughter believed in the merciful God in whose name these men were murdering her. Gunilda trusted in the old ways, the old goddesses of earth and water, fire and blood, and it was in their name that, with her dying breath, she cursed Warren and the unborn child his mistress carried, cursed every child that would ever spring from his loins.
Her daughter, alone now, quite alone, watched the body of her mother fired to ashes and smelt the stench of her mother's roasting flesh. No longer weeping now, she stood, aflame with hatred, as the white dust of her mother was carried up by the wind and fell soft as snowflakes upon her own dark hair.